On a big motor cruiser owned by North American Aviation, builder of the Apollo command
module, Janet Armstrong, the wife of Apollo ll’s commander, and her two boys, twelve-year-old Rick and six-year-old Mark, stood nervously awaiting the launch.

Originally, the White House had planned for Nixon to dine with the Apollo 11 astronauts the night before liftoff, but the plan changed after Dr. Charles Berry, the astronauts’ chief physician, was quoted in the press warning that there was always a chance that the president might unknowingly be harboring an
incipient cold.

CBS’s sixty-one-year-old commentator Heywood Hale Broun, best known for his
irreverent sports journalism, experienced the liftoff with several thousand people along Cocoa Beach, some fifteen miles south of the launchpad.

Reverend Ralph Abernathy, successor to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and
de facto leader of the American civil rights movement, marched with four mules and about 150 members of the Poor People’s Campaign for Hunger as close as they were allowed to get to the sprawling spaceport.

Over the years since she had given her life to Jesus Christ as a young teenager, she had uttered many
fervent prayers, “but never was there a prayer like this one. I had actually heard the announcement with my own ears that our son had been chosen to be on the coming Moon landing team!”

The great Scottish writer and onetime Borderlands resident Sir Walter Scott wrote four centuries later in his poem “Lay of the Minstrel” of the flaming arrows emblematic of
endemic clan feuds: “Ye need no go to Liddisdale, for when they see the blazing bale, Elliots and Armstrongs never fail.”

Decades’ worth of
flagrant expansion by the Armstrongs into what had come to be known as “the Debatable Land” eventually forced the royal hand, as did their purported crimes of burning down fifty-two Scottish churches.

The doctor did not permit her to attend her father-in-law Willis’s funeral, but with Stephen at home she arranged for Neil to be baptized by Reverend Burkett, the minister who had married them, in a “
hallowed place, truly sacred,” the same living room where the couple’s marriage and Neil’s birth had taken place.

According to Neil’s brother Dean, Cronkite on another occasion asked Neil if he felt closer to God when he stood on the Moon’s surface, to which Neil gave a totally ridiculous
non sequitur: “You know, Walter, sometimes a man just wants a good cigar.”

The Moon, so Zint said, “seemed to be Neil’s main interest. He would
dote on it, ”as well as expressing “a particular interest” in “the possibility of life on other planets....We hashed it over and concluded there was no life on the Moon, but there probably was on Mars.”

“To the best of my recollection,” Armstrong admits today with reluctance and typical reserve, so as not to overly
impugn the reputation of Wapakoneta’s highly publicized amateur astronomer, “I was only at Jake Zint’s observatory the one time. As for looking through Zint’s telescope and having private conversations with Zint about the Moon and the universe, they never happened....Mr. Zint’s story grew after I became well known,” Neil says.

According to a volunteer group in Warren, Ohio, that has worked through the early 2000s to turn the Warren airport site into a historical exhibit, the date of Neil’s
inaugural flight was July 26, 1936.

As Armstrong entered college, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA’s
predecessor, along with the newly established U.S. Air Force, moved ahead ambitiously to construct new research facilities devoted to transonics, supersonics, and hypersonics (the speed regime, at around Mach 5, where the effects of aerodynamic heating became pronounced).

Armstrong did not choose to pursue the new Theoretical Aeronautics option that premiered at Purdue in the fall of 1954, but he did, in his final semester of coursework, take its very challenging course on
vector analysis.

He also had
intermittent weekend responsibilities as an officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve, carpooling with his Purdue navy buddies to the Naval Air Station in Glenview, Illinois, north of Chicago, to fly F9F-6 jets.

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